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Seems to be a lot of forum necromancers around whenever Spring comes. Guess it comes with all the new riders

double points for good use of the word 'necromancer.' and welcome back if i didn't already say so in the other post.

dean owens wrote: i would like to know how i'm on shaky ground though.

just a quick list of a few
roger bacon
jean buridan
william turner
francis bacon
galileo
rene descartes
isaac newton

i'm trying to figure out what the shaky ground is.

The shaky ground is that all of these people were interested in science because they wanted to understand the material world around them, not because they were Christians. In each case they succeeded to some degree or other in banishing god to the margins (Descartes and Newton notably). In some cases their Christianity was heavily compromised by their scientific and philosophical enquiries and, from the 18th century on, many of them, ended up as deists.

In a pre-scientific European world the only way to understand the environment was through religious ideology. At that time you could take just about any enterprise, worthy or blameworthy and say that it was conducted by Christians. Christian and European meant just about the same thing. There is nothing particularly remarkable or significant in this fact.

LOL Hiya Dean - feeling testily anti-Christian at the moment. Growl!

While I dont tend to think of myself as religious, I do like to think that there is something out there that is bigger then what we see. Its hard for me to look at the world around me and say "gee, thats nice, but everything here can be traced back and broken down into a mathmatical equation" Theres too much wonder for there not to be something more then what we see. I dont like the "man in the clouds made everything" view either though. Very unscientific I know, but heck, it makes me happy. Happy medium anyone? Id be down with that.

i'm tempted on so many levels to add to the conversation, but for the moment will limit my input to recommending the viewing of religulous - by bill maher - who admits freely that his core religious belief is doubt - notably doubt in organized religion. worth watching - for believer and non-believer alike.

I finally got around to watching Jesus Camp. It was interesting but not as distressing as I'd expected. Three things got to me though, two of them were comments made by the woman who ran the camp (can't recall her name).

The first was her belief that children are very 'useable' in the service of her religion. The film clearly showed how her co-religionists were stuffing young, unformed minds full of religious ideology and then sending them out on the streets to preach at strangers. I guess this does distress me, not because the kids are being brainwashed, (we're all 'brainwashed' by our culture one way or another) but because they were being consciously and deliberately manipulated by adults for their own ideological purposes. I'd call that abuse, not use.

The second was the woman's claim that 'we are right'. Everyone who holds an opinion thinks it is right or they wouldn't hold it. But there is a big difference in claiming that 'an opinion' is right and that 'we' are right. And to make the assertion so blatantly comes across as an act of aggression. If anyone has any doubt that Christian fundamentalism is a highly agressive and authoritarian form of religion operating through assertion and dogma rather than evidence or consensus, this film will dispell it. While I was watching the film I kept being reminded of the way fundamentalist Christians bully each other on their forums, threatening each other with damnation if they deviate ever so slightly from the collective beliefs of their sect. I've seen that so many times.

The third was the degree of ideological ignorance promoted as fact by these people. The scene where the mother is teaching her child about climate change and evolution is fascinating. The materialist position is dismissed in a few cheap misrepresentations of the scientific method. No doubt the mother actually believes the rubbish that she is telling her son, but that presumably is because she chooses to.

Christians like to claim that they are guided by the authority of the bible. But in this instance the mother is mindlessly giving authority to the authors of an anti-scientific book which has no claim to divine authority whatsoever. This is just a slavish acceptance of the ideology of the group. (It seems to me in any case that the idea of divine authority is itself a fraud, since if you choose to believe something, you always do it on your own authority and no-one else's. A book only has authority if you give authority to it.)

Talking to some fundamentalist aquaintances the other day, I was told that many of them take a vow that no-matter how much evidence is presented to them, they will not question or abandon their faith. That's their business. But because they make social claims with their ideology, it's also worrying.

Personally, I'm very glad to know those kind of attitudes are quarantined off by the Atlantic and I don't have to deal with them much here.

My tuppence worth!